1.
Background
Change is coming to public services in Lambeth. The cooperative council is
Lambeth’s big idea for local government. It’s about giving people more
involvement and control of the services they use and the places where they live
by putting council resources in their hands.
Over the years, we have seen how cooperation between service providers, such
as the council, and those who use or are affected by services, such as residents
and communities, has resulted in public services that are more closely aligned
with people’s needs and expectations. In Lambeth, there are dozens of
examples of this approach in action, and this was the inspiration for the
cooperative council.
In addition, the aftermath of recession and the deepest cuts in Government
funding for a generation, demanded a reform of public services – they simply
could not continue to be delivered in the same ways.
The cooperative council shows that this ethos - of meaningful partnership and
cooperation - is the foundation on which public services can be run in years to
come.
The cooperative council aims to:
• Turn more citizens from passive recipients into active
shapers of services
• Deliver more effective, m ore responsive services by giving users
more control
• Strengthen civil society so it’s better able to deal with challenges
• Do things ‘with’ our communities rather than ‘to’ our communities
This is an opportunity to think creatively and realistically about local public
services, with the prospect of improved, more responsive service delivery as the
result.
The overall Good for Nothing challenge
Lambeth has 64 parks and green spaces. Lots of them are in great shape and
are being used by local people in innovative, positive ways. Many however, are
less well cared for and as budgets are reduced they need even more volunteer
support to sustain and improve them.
Our challenge is to find ways to engage more people from more diverse
backgrounds in helping make the borough’s parks better, more positive places
to be. How can we help people to make all of Lambeth’s green spaces feel like
they really belong to them and their local communities?

2.
The brief
We have identified the Lambeth parks with the most positive stuff happening
around them and we have the ‘keys’ to some of the most problematic spaces
across the borough. We have 2 days to identify innovative ways to recruit new
and different groups of people into greater engagement with their local parks:
- by identifying and distilling best practice from across the borough and
beyond – who are the park pioneers and how can we capture and share
their learning in engaging ways?
- finding ways to communicate the opportunities around greater park
‘ownership’ to more diverse and less typical park audiences
- initiating and seeding fresh activities in some of the more ‘unloved’ parks
to help new audiences ‘learn by doing’
- identifying ways to get more social entrepreneurship happening in and
around Lambeth parks
Potential outputs
1. Prototypes for engaging ways to join the dots between existing green space
initiatives with the potential to engage more diverse audiences
2. Ideas for repackaging and adding angles to existing initiatives to help them
to communicate more effectively to diverse audiences
3. Prototypes of innovative initiatives to engage different audiences in park
improvement
4. Prototypes for new structures that sit between the council and residents
where troubled parks are turned into opportunities.
5. Communication ideas to encourage groups that don’t traditionally use parks
feel stronger ownership over them
6. Ideas for events and initiatives that bring more diverse communities
together in parks